Comment by Sharlin
2 days ago
My last workplace had a similar institution, only the reward was candy bar or similar that you could go grab from a bowl in the kitchen (working on an honor code basis), in addition to getting some praise on Slack for general warm fuzzies. It was more of a symbolic gesture for recognizing small everyday things, of course, but it was nice IMO.
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I don’t get the connection to capitalism here. Care to elaborate?
Probably referring to the fact that they only rewarded them with a candy bar for being a good employee. Which ignores the fact that they're already probably getting paid a decent salary to do their job, and being a good employee is already part of the job description to receive said salary. Anything extra is nice.
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This video should help: https://youtu.be/QIrM9vKKxTs
People don't show up to work for a gold star, they want money. Any consolation you offer employees in the form of a candy bar or massage credits can be better expressed as a fiscal bonus that isn't half as patronizing.
If you see this as a "why can't we have nice things" situation, then you must not grasp how these incentives replace actual motivation. It's the equivalent of tipping culture transposed to overpaid SWE seats. It should not exist. Fair compensation should be demanded as a baseline.
Really, it just references the ridiculous lengths companies do to not actually pay employees to do good work. Utterly broken reward systems, foosball tables, etc.
I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a promotion or a title... I have heard of AWS tech people getting pretty big bonuses for big service wins. But that was a huge anomaly.
Capitalism is supposed to (in theory) reward efficiency and productivity. The CEOs certainly know how to advocate for financial performance rewards, as do many other managerial tiers.
Candy bars? Christ, it's kindergarten. I just never fail to be amazed that "capitalism" is a bunch of rigid hierarchical despotic firms fighting in a "free market"... well back when there were approximation of free markets. When you're in these tightly structured orgs, it's like authoritarian planned economies (that is communism in the totalitarian soviet sense, not any putative ideal of communism).
I'll spare you all the further rants about Middle Manaagement Machiavellianism.
Congrats on your candy bar and employee of the week picture.
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